Radio Snack Radio Creative Services

Voice recording and its applications have immensely grown with many people today recording their voices for commercials, narratives, audio visual presentations, business presentation and even home movies.

Recording your voice has gotten easier and simpler, especially with the availability of tools and technology that allows an ordinary user to record voice.

In the old days recording voice was done on a recording device or apparatus, this was the machine that would capture the sound, of course you needed a microphone for that. The sound was usually captured on a tape recorded, open reel tape machine and even beta.

These days sound can be captured and stored directly into your computer as data, for quick integration into digital movies, presentations or whatever applications needed.

Many people also include voice on their websites; majority of these are online marketers selling products on a sales page. Now, knowing how sales pages are, they could get quite lengthy and tiring to read, so some marketers provide their visitors with the option to simply click a button and play an mp3 or wav file that is a voice narrative of the content on the sales page.

I have not yet done that on a sales page, but I have included audio on some of my sites and some of my blogs. The statistics show, that audio used properly on a website or sales page, increases conversions. The only other reasons why I record my voice is for radio commercial and voice over jobs, a hobby I have been into since 1993.

Since it is now easy to get the equipment and software needed, many people create their own small voice over studios in their own home, mine is even inside my bedroom. To ensure that no other sound is captured, the room has to be sound proofed and properly insulated.

If you are planning to record voice, for whatever reasons there be, here are the thing that you would need.

1. A Microphone

When you are first getting started I would not suggest getting an expensive microphone. You can just get a cheap computer microphone and work with that; it would be good enough for recordings that are going to be uploaded into your server.

Eventually if you become more discerning about your sound, you might consider investing in a real microphone, however othing expensive. Some microphones may require a mixer and some don’t . I used to record straight into my computer with just an ordinary Electro Voice 635, cabled into the audio port. But that was years ago, since I produce a lot of radio commercials that need to be of good recording quality, I had invested in a more expensive microphone, a tube pre amp for the mic, a good sound card, and a compressor / sustainer device. You don’t really need to get all that, unless you make some serious money from voice recording.

2. A Computer

Most of the modern PC’s are powerful and fast enough to handle audio editing applications; if your PC is not up to date a Pentium 3 running o 256 RAM would be sufficient for simple voice recording and editing tasks.

3. Audio Editing Software

There is a lot of audio editing software in the market, some are simple recording applications which allow you to record your voice, play it back, do some cut and paste, and maybe apply some special effects to your voice like reverb or echo.

However there are also some software which are professional grade and are actually entire virtual studios that can be used to record and master entire bands or mutliple instruments, with multiple tracks.

I have been recording digitally since 1997 and I have been with one brand ever since. The software used to be called Cool Edit Pro once owned by the Syntrillium Corp, but later on it was bought by Adobe and thus, today’s Adobe Audition. This works well, whether for simple recording for commercials which may take not more than 5 tracks, and can be as flexible as 64 track mixing.

I would have recommended free software for beginners, if only I knew any, but I don’t and even if I did, I probably wouldn’t recommend them if I had no working knowledge of the software. But most software is really easy to learn, it just takes a little messing around with and practice.

After recording and mastering the file, Adobe Audition gives me the option to save the file into wav, mp3 or a lot more. It depends really on what you want to use the file for. WAV files are ideal for mastering into CD and mp3’s are what I usually upload on websites.

So basically, that is what you need to get into voice recording.